Here’s the dirty little secret I kept from the world during my 30 years in the newspaper business: I hardly ever read editorials, those expressions of institutional opinion that typically make up in ponderousness what they lack in insight. I remembered the reason for that policy when I saw this editorial from the Greensboro News-Record, a newspaper I rarely read. (Why I came across it is a long and not very interesting tale.)

The editorial offers a full-throated defense of the law, now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, that makes it possible for people to be criminally prosecuted for depriving the public of “honest services.”

Critics say the measure is vague and overly broad. During oral arguments in December, Justice Antonin Scalia wondered whether it could be used to charge a salaried employee who phones in sick to go to a ball game.

The court shouldn’t get tangled up in trivialities. While it’s possible for prosecutors to apply any law too vigorously, juries can tell the difference between a worker who cheats his employer out of a day’s pay and a corrupt public official or dishonest corporate executive.

… [T]here needs to be a law to catch all the people in power who fail in their duty to provide “honest services free of improper influence or corruption.” The court should not strike this one.

If you need help understanding when a public official or business executive is guilty of failing to provide “honest service,” try this: It’s when anyone behaves in a fashion that you just know is shady. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something’s fishy. When that happens, that person is de facto guilty of being improperly influenced by others. He or she hasn’t given you honest service.

I’m not exaggerating, and that’s the trouble with this ludicrous law. As Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil liberties lawyer, explained in this essay, the absurdly vague definition of “honest services” is an invitation to prosecutorial abuse:

If a federal prosecutor felt in his gut that the individual had somehow deprived the voters or the corporation and shareholders of the “honest services” that were, in the prosecutor’s sole discretion, due, the defendant could end up serving a decades-long prison sentence. To my mind, it was rather like prosecuting, convicting and imprisoning a citizen for being “a bad person,” with the government defining badness.

You’d think that a newspaper in a state where flawed prosecutions have recently resulted in an embarrassing number of overturned convictions would be a bit more measured in its zeal to keep this arrow in the government’s quiver.

Occasionally, I read something in the newspaper that leaves me wondering why it was even published. Sunday was one of those days, when I read a story in the News & Observer headlined, “For tabloids, Edwards saga was tailor-made.”

The article was a first-person account by political columnist Rob Christensen of the difficulty he and his colleagues faced in confirming the particulars of the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter scandal. It’s not a mea culpa, exactly, nor does it truly pull back the curtain on the reporting process. What’s more, I don’t get the timing: Why does the N&O offer, in February 2010, a quasi-explanation of how it got beat by the National Enquirer in 2008?

The unintended result of the piece is to offer up Christensen as a punching bag to a certain segment of readers. Lots of them availed themselves of the opportunity. The article has sparked a healthy number of comments, almost all of which pile scorn on the paper in general and Christensen in particular. OK, the Edwards saga wasn’t the N&O’s finest moment, but Christensen deserves better than this. I’ve known Rob for a long time, and call him a friend. He’s a fine reporter, scrupulously fair and nonpartisan, well-mannered in a profession where social grace is rare, generous in his judgments of others, and a guy more interested in understanding issues than adding a scalp to his belt. (Again, a rare quality in the news business.)

In short, the notion that Christensen was in the tank for Edwards is absurdly, totally wrong. But as I read his piece Sunday, I realized there is something conspicuously missing from the article. What do you notice, for instance, about this passage:

As early as 2003, I asked Edwards about a rumored affair from his days as a big-time trial lawyer. Edwards denied it. His campaign spokeswoman called my boss to complain that in all of the years of working in the Clinton White House she had never heard such off-base questions. One of his chief political advisers threw me out of his office the next day.

Or this one:

The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer pursued the story from the beginning, sending reporters to New Jersey and California to follow leads. But the story was a dead end because no one was talking, and Edwards and his staff were denying everything.

I’ll tell you what I notice: None of Edwards’ staffers and advisers — who either knew their boss was philandering or strongly suspected it — is named. That’s a mistake. Whoever those people are, they aided or tolerated a coverup. Why do they now get the courtesy of anonymity?

I never take anything with me to read when I go to the gym for my thrice-weekly session with the stationary bike. Instead, the gym’s magazine rack serves as a kind of reading lottery — I take whatever it offers on any particular morning. One day last week, my best choice was a dog-eared copy of the June 29, 2009  issue of The New Yorker, which contained a profile of James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a leading climate-change activist. This passage from the article stood out:

Speaking before a congressional special committee last year, Hansen asserted that fossil-fuel companies were knowingly spreading misinformation about global warming and that their chairmen “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.” He has compared freight trains carrying coal to “death trains,” and wrote to the head of the National Mining Association, who sent him a letter of complaint, that if the comparison “makes you uncomfortable, well, perhaps it should.”

What a difference eight months makes. Now that we know a significant amount of misinformation about global warming originated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I wonder if Hansen believes his fellow activist, IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri, should likewise be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature? If that thought disturbs Hansen, well, perhaps it should.